Google Drive has come a long way from being an online-only, document viewer and editor. From managing your files to collaborating on Docs, Drive is a full-functioning office suite. What many people don’t realize is its capability to do far more than only view PDFs.

Drive has some native features that already make it a great PDF tool, but the compatible third-party Drive apps extend its usefulness and functionality. Let’s take a look at ten fantastic ways you can ditch Adobe Acrobat Reader and make Google Drive work for you even better.

Native Features

Save To Google Drive From Chrome

Google Chrome is an awesome PDF viewer, and Mihir showed us how Chrome’s built-in viewer can do far more than read PDFs, one of which was saving web pages to your computer as PDFs. What you may not know, however, is if you’re logged into Chrome, you can also save to Google Drive.

Click the Printer on the bottom right corner, then instead of printing, click the Change button. Scroll down past Local Destinations to the Google Cloud Print section, where you’ll see Save to Google Drive.

Search Text From PDFs (OCR)

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that allows text from images and PDFs to be read and converted into a searchable and editable document. To do this in Google Drive, right click on a PDF, then Open with > Google Docs. Once you have opened it in Google Docs format, save it again and you’ll have your searchable doc.

Export Any Doc To PDF

If you have a doc other than a PDF, which you’d like to convert to PDF, the process is simple. On the opened doc, click File > Download as > PDF Document.

TIP: Sync the file immediately into Google Drive by saving it in the local Google Drive folder. Now you won’t even have to manually upload the file back into Google Drive.

The Document Scanner for Google Drive (Android only) is really quite impressive. It automatically detects the edges of the paper and modifies the image to a high contrast to bring out the text. After the picture is taken, you’ll see some editing options in the top right corner. The plus sign “+” in the lower left allows you to put several photos together and upload as a single PDF. Once you’re done, click the “check mark” in the lower right corner and move on to naming and saving the file to a folder in Google Drive.

Google Drive Add-ons

Notable PDF is a browser extension and app that turns Chrome into the ultimate PDF reader. With options to highlight, strikethrough, underline, and add comments and text, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more intuitive and comprehensive add-on for Google Drive.

The Premium plan runs for $12/year giving you the ability to work offline, sign PDFs, and split and merge them, among other features. But don’t worry – if you want to sign, split and merge PDFs, and aren’t opposed to using additional extensions, I’ve got some great recommendations.

Fill Out & Sign PDFs

Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer works great for filling out interactive PDFs, but if you have to add check marks, signatures or repetitive information, you may want to look at a service such as HelloSign (shown above) or DocuSign (shown below).

Both have modern interfaces allowing you to find your way around easily, though I will say that HelloSign is much easier in this area. DocuSign and HelloSign also allow you to draw or import a picture of your signature.

The free accounts are very similar too. If you’re going to be collaborating and sharing a lot of PDFs, you may want to consider a premium account. HelloSign allows you to send 3 documents every month for free, where DocuSign allows you to send only three total. Signing (but not sharing) from the services is always free.

Honorable Mention: RightSignature has pretty good reviews and seems to do well too. Two negatives are the slightly dated interface and ease of navigation around the app. However, it is still a great tool worth mentioning.

HelloFax — from the same makers as HelloSign — is a service that allows you to send and receive faxes, without a fax machine. It is free, though it has limitations: faxing docs up to 5/month, no ability to email to fax, receive faxes or fax to multiple recipients. If you want any of these things, the cheapest plan is $9.99/mo. However, for sending the occasional fax, it is great.

Merge Multiple PDFs

PDF Mergy is my tool of choice when merging PDFs. It’s simple and it works. If the PDFs are in the same location on Google Drive, select them, right click, hover over “Open with” and click “PDF Mergy”. The files will automatically be imported into the PDF Mergy website. You can also easily move them about, drag and drop more files or select files from Google Drive.

Once you’re satisfied, click the blue “Merge” button. You’ll be prompted to name and save locally or to Google Drive.

Another PDF merging tool is called PDFMerge!, however in addition to its busy interface, it doesn’t integrate very well into Google Drive. Though it will show up in the right click menu upon selecting multiple files, it didn’t readily import them when I clicked it, leaving me slightly confused. Does it still work? Yes, but PDF Mergy beats it with its simplicity.

Use PDFSplit! To Split PDFs

Now that I have just bashed PDFMerge!, I’m going to turn back around and recommend one of its sister tools, PDFSplit! The interface has the same not-so-pretty interface as PDFMerge! and others in the lineup, but the essentials are there and that’s all you can ask. With the PDF open in Google Drive, click “Open with” in the top bar and select PDFSplit!

Once at the PDFSplit! page, you’ll see the file is already there and can enter in which pages you want split from the PDF. You do this several times by clicking the red “+ More” button. Check any of the additional options and click “Split!”

Protect Your PDFs

PDFProtect! allows you to password protect and set restrictions to a PDF. The encryption was so good, that PDFUnlock! couldn’t even crack it… thus I left that tool out of the write-up. PDFProtect! seems to be the only Google Drive add-on with the capability to password protect and encrypt PDFs.

Hi,
Have you ever seen a PDF file that consist of table of content with several items which can go directly to that content by just clicking on that subject.
How to make such a like this file in PDF?how to make it
Great thanks

Is there a google drive pdf viewer that can read incripted .mp4 files, or .gif files like files constructed with latex's media9 package or with adobe acrobat pro? This would be useful for giving presentations on other computers that dont have the right flash player version installed etc.

Hi, I'd like to know how to increase the chances of one of my documents on google drive appearing when someone searches the topic/article on google. I've already changed the setting to make it viewable by public (I think so anyway).

When I open a pdf with google docs only part of the file is opened. For example, the last time I tried only 13 pages of a 17 page paper opened up. Do you know if there is a size limit involved in the conversion?

Hello, Great article! Using google drive via google nexus 5, I cannot navigate a PDF file by entering page number. Before the lollipop update, I could easily search by page number and not tediously scroll up hundreds of pages, like I do now. Does the google doc app have a page number entry when viewing PDF files ? Cause I can't find it and scrolling slows down my phone .

Couple of ways to scan a file to Google Drive
I have a little utility scan on my desktop called NAPS2 Scan. Was either cheap or free. Lets me scan either to a pdf file or a jpeg file for instance. and works with my normal printers with scan. I made a folder on my desktop and called it Scans. Save to this folder. On my desktop I also have the Drive icon. I just drag the pdf from the Scans folder over to the Drive icon, and there it is in Drice. Could also open drive and just paste.
On my ippad I have an app called Scanner Pro - by Readdle. Using the camera Scanner Pro scans the page to a pdf file and does a good job, and then you can save to Google Drive.

I am looking for an embeddable pdf viewer to work with multiple browsers for my Wix website that has google drive underpinnings for all the data. Google drive used to support pdf viewing via their "google drive" widget. But this method but no longer works (as of sometime in the fall 2014 - they say the API changed (?) - and only "google docs/google sheets" (a.k.a "supported" google drive formats ) are directly viewable.

Is there an embeddable widget that works for multiple browsers that I could use to make a pdf directly viewable? Any help or pointers would be appreciated. I just may be missing the boat trying to solve this issue.

I used to be able to convert scanned PDFs to editable text using Google Drive, now Google Drive removed its OCR feature for scanned PDF documents. It can only convert text-based PDFs to editable text. It's so frustrating.

Thanks Aaron, I agree there is a lot of space for them to put this data.

The "x or x items" appears to only display when you click on the PDF from within Drive. When you get the PDF via direct link that doesn't display. We attach PDF's via Drive from 3rd party apps which is why we use direct links a lot.

What is even more frustrating, we will save a PDF to a shared folder and click "Email Collaborators..." this generates an email to everyone on the shared folder via Gmail.... the users click on the link from Gmail to view the document (again direct link viewing) and we still have no idea where this document is stored despite that fact that it is already located everyone's "My Drive" - the "x or x items" does not show up either.

One of the most frustrating things about the new Drive PDF viewer is you can't see the file location or move the file location. For example, in a Sheet or Doc you can click the folder icon and navigate to the location in Drive or click Organize to move it to a new location. 6-8 months ago you could do the same with PDFs but not anymore... You can't even see the file location.

When you are in Drive it is easy enough to click out of the viewer to move the file or see the directory ect but when you click on a direct link to the PDF you can't do that and have no idea where the original PDF is located.

Happens to us all the time... "Hey Jim take a look at this PDF - John (attached via google drive from a shared folder we both have added to our My Drive and we are collaborating on)

When you click on the Gmail link I see the PDF but have no idea where it is in My Drive because there is no information about it - If Jim and I have multiple shared folders we work in this is valuable information. Maybe I want to see other files in that folder that contains THIS pdf.... Nope that isn't possible. Instead I have to leave my email, go to Drive search the file name find it in my own. Hopefully there are not similar versions with the same file name or same file name but in different directories...

I've submitted feature request for this from the 'Feedback' link in the PDF viewer but the feature has yet to come back... Surely I am not the only one that needs this.

In Google Drive I used to be able to highlight text in PDF documents that originated from an uploaded scan. Since at least a year or so I can't. I've google for this problem, but it appears I'm the only one which probably isn't the case. Hoped finding an answer in this article, but unforunately I haven't.

Thanks Aaron for the tip. Actually I meant selecting text. Not highlighting. Reason that it would be too much of a workaround, because I scan a few letters on a daily basis. What I do is scan it, my scanner auto-uploads to Drive, then I rename it to:
[company name] - [subject of the letter] - [date]. Now, the subject is what I would select in the scanned letter and paste in the middle part of the name of the document. This has to go without too many clicks, you see?

I've been using google drive and saving documents as pdf for awhile. Today, I went to the new drive and now when I click on file, save as pdf-nothing happens. No prompt saying it cannot be completed but also, not the typical option to proceed with the save. I've done a lot of google searching to figure it out but everything is outdated. You have the newest info I can find on it. Any ideas? I am not going back and forth between the new and old drive so I don't know why the option is to save as pdf if it will not happen when I make that selection from the dropdown menu. Help!

You can convert a PDF to "Google Docs format" which is in a .doc, but I think extracting data from a PDF into a spreadsheet is a whole other level. Not aware of anything like that at this time, but if I do find anything, I'll let you know.

Aaron is a Vet Assistant graduate, with his primary interests in wildlife and technology. He enjoys exploring the outdoors and photography. When he's not writing or indulging in technological findings throughout the interwebs, he can be found bombing down the mountainside on his bike. Read more about Aaron on his personal website.